The Weird Al Show a Way Moby Forgotten Show

On September
1997 the Weird Al show premiered on CBS on Saturday morning. It ran against
Pinky and the Brain, Eerie Indiana, and I think Hang Time and The Bugs Bunny
and Tweety Show.

CBS had a pretty
forgettable lineup which also included The New Ghostwriter Mysteries, Wheel
2000, and Sports Illustrated for Kids’. My local affiliate also showed old
reruns of Fudge from ABC and Beakman’s World. Well that is what they showed on
KCBS. The lineup on the Wikipedia isn’t that accurate or does not really
reflect what my local affiliate showed. Most of the time his show got preempted
by sports it would usually be shown in the late afternoon like at 2:30 PM.

Although I was
13 when the show premiered I had listened to Dr. Demento in the summer of 1995.
I was familiar with some of Al’s songs, and I was getting into novelty music.

I’m going to
talk about the first aired episode “Bad Influence”. It seems to be the episode
I remember most. I think I saw that episode at least 2 times. This episode was
not meant to be the first one shown. The episode is the third in the production
number. The first episode that was meant to be aired was “He ain’t Heavy He’s
My Hamster”, but it aired as the tenth episode.

The things I
liked about this show were the fake commercials.

Bobby The
inquisitive boy usually led Al to show him some old type of instructional
parody film.

The Barenaked
Ladies make an appearance, and performed “Shoe Box”. I love that song! It was
on the first “Friends” soundtrack.

I think the show
could have survived if it had more publicity. Not many people knew about the
show. It also would have done better if it was on a better network. A network
that was more focused on children’s programming either broadcast or cable. CBS
was just producing a forgettable line up to meet the E/I rules set by the FCC.
I think his show might have thrived on a channel like Fox on the Fox Kids
block, Nickelodeon, or MTV.

The show had a
lot of guest stars, including Hanson, David Bowie and Al’s parents.

As you know, we were watching the same stations growing up and I only caught The Weird Al Show 2-3 times in it's original run, even though I was a big fan with all of his albums (except Polka Party). Luckily I rented the DVD set from Netflix a few years ago and got to watch the whole series. It was super quirky and fun, like the Nickelodeon version of his movie UHF.